watershed development in rural areas

A very interesting paper crossed my inbox, which related to how one can develop watersheds in rural areas. This is obviously not for countries and regions who are blessed with good irrigation or don't need irrigation. But in the majority of the world, agricultural irrigation and water is required, crucial and becoming dangerously difficult/expensive as time goes on. More importantly, the development of the watershed has vast social implications for any government (emerging or developed country) as it directly hits either food production or rural employment/economies. The measurement of the social impact is difficult but this paper address that need. But I would like to quote some bits from the paper.


“The real area of focus has to be our unirrigated and dry land areas. Watershed development and rain water harvesting hold out immense promise in addressing this issue … I would like to make it perfectly clear that our vision of Indian agriculture continues and will continue to be based on smallholder farming.”
Dr. Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India, March 2005.

“An estimated 27% of farmers did not like farming because it was not profitable. In all, 40% felt that, given a choice, they would take up some other career.”
National survey of farmers in rural India, July 2005.

Quite interesting as to how the government in the form of the prime minister is aiming at and what a very large proportion of the farmers are thinking about. This is a major gap, and this is why countries such as India are so heavily interested in agriculture. Just because farmers would like to take up another career does not mean that they CAN! (because of lack of opportunities, lack of education, lack of funding.......). This also explains why India is so anal about the current WTO round negotiations. There is NO WAY that India can lower barriers to agricultural trade to the extent demanded by the EU and USA as we are talking about the impact being on hundreds of millions of very poor farmers. With a non-existent to zero safety net, India is happy to live with unproductive (compared to western mechanised farming) farmers, expensive inputs, high subsidy and uneconomic farming.

R.A. Hope, Evaluating Social Impacts of Watershed Development in India, World Development, Volume 35, Issue 8, August 2007, Pages 1436-1449. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VC6-4P248GD-1/2/fd79508c9f9bd87341c41193ff203830)
Abstract: Summary Watershed development is an important policy instrument for rural development in many developing countries. However, evidence of the distribution and magnitude of social impacts attributable to watershed interventions is often ambiguous. This study uses a propensity score matching method to estimate social impacts on gross agricultural returns and domestic water collection times from treatment and control watershed data in the state of Madhya Pradesh, India. Results illustrate how matching methods can objectively estimate social impacts of watershed development across intended beneficiary groups. This promotes improved understanding of the performance of current watershed projects and provides inputs for the appropriate design of future rural development interventions.
Keywords: Asia; India; propensity score matching; rural development; watershed development